Hands up who hasn't made an offer to buy some part of Intel

Brit chip designer Arm is reportedly the latest to make an attempted play for Intel's product division. Or, at least that's what unnamed sources have told Bloomberg, which claims that Arm's supposed offer was rebuffed by Intel execs who said the division isn't for sale. The Softbank-owned outfit, apparently, wasn't interested …

[Anonymous Coward]

FPGA?

Maybe they were looking to buy Altera(?)

[cyberdemon]

Hands up who hasn't made an offer to buy some part of Intel

Me!

And if I could short-sell it, I would

[Paul Herber]

Re: Hands up who hasn't made an offer to buy some part of Intel

I could buy some corner of one of the cleaning cupboards that is forever England.

What do you mean there's no view? I want to see the sea!

[timrowledge]

Re: Hands up who hasn't made an offer to buy some part of Intel

Me neither. But then ever since 1986 I’ve been telling everyone that an intel x86 is a waste of perfectly good sand.

[Michael Hoffmann]

Raises hand

Icon is my thumb up while raising hand.

[Anonymous Custard]

I got a cappucino in the cafe last time I was on-site.

Does that count?

[Robert E A Harvey]

The UK Government?

Given the UK has just bought Coherent Inc's facility in Newton Aycliffe, perhaps they had a pop at Intel??

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-buys-semiconductor-factory-for-defence-purposes

[David 164]

Re: The UK Government?

I raise a eyebrow in reading that report and it hasn't been covered anywhere. A interesting acquisition, I'm wondering if we will eventually see it acquiring licenses to manufacturer a much wider array of computer processors in the coming years. At least enough capacity, we can supply the military ourselves and not rely on imports from Taiwan and US.

I also wonder if eventually it be transferred to the sovereign wealth fund to run rather than kept at the MOD. The sovereign wealth fund would have more interest in expanding it beyond just military applications.

[Robert E A Harvey]

Unreported elsewhere?

I wonder if El Reg could look into it!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Unreported elsewhere?

They could start by looking at the BBC News report.

Not linked, I leave that as an exercise for a tech savvy journo :-)

[Spazturtle]

Re: The UK Government?

It's not a logic fab, it makes Gallium arsenide (GaA) semiconductors, which are mainly used for radio amplifiers and a variety of FETs.

GaA RF amplifiers are used when you want low noise and to only amplify a very narrow frequency, otherwise you can use GaN RF amplifiers which produce more noise and have a wider amplification band, but are more heat tolerate and cheaper.

For logic the UK and US use BAE Systems who offer radiation hardened versions of GlobalFoundries's 45nm (RH45) and now 12nm (RH12) nodes, they are made in GF's fabs in the US.

[heyrick]

I haven't made an offer yet

So here it is. A couple of euro coins and one slightly expired partly used but still good tub of Bird's Custard.

Interested? Because I'd love to bake a 2GHz 65C02 just for the lulz.

[Pete Sdev]

ARM trolls Intel

"We'll give you £35 and a packet of cheese & onion crisps for your product division, interested?"

In the intro:

Brit chip designer Arm

Shouldn't that read 'Japanese chip designer Arm' these days?

[Bogga]

Re: ARM trolls Intel

Or American... given the stock listing location.

[herberts ghost]

Never eat something bigger than your head.

ARM proved to the world that CPU design is no longer a high art limited to a few gods. Now ARMs biggest threat is open source ... RISCV. ARM buying Intel is like one Rock tying itself to another rock to stay afloat.

[John Brown (no body)]

The "market cap"

"Sure, Arm's market cap exceeds Intel's by a significant margin at $152 billion vs $101 billion. But, as wild as that fact is, that's about all Arm has going for it, in terms of acquiring a target like Chipzilla.

In the second quarter of 2024 alone, Intel products drove $11.8 billion in revenues and had an operating income of $2.9 billion.

Arm, by comparison, netted $3.23 billion in revenues and $111 million in operating income — $306 million net income — in the entirety of its 2024 fiscal year.

So, Arm is valued far higher than Intel, yet Arm is actually tiny in comparison to the behemoth that is Intel both in staff/facilities and most especially in the financials?

The stock market never ceases to amaze me.

[RichardBarrell]

Re: The "market cap"

Would you rather own a small business that makes money or a large one that loses it?

[Annihilator]

"Arm's business revolves around licensing these architecture and IP holdings to fabless chip designers like Apple, Qualcomm, Ampere, and others"

Hand up if you read this in the style of a Welsh valleys girl being enthusiastic about those chip designers.

[John Brown (no body)]

LOL, no , but now that you mention it... :-)

[fg_swe]

AMPERE

They make very interesting ARM ISA CPUs.

100+ cores and quite competitive versus Xeon.

Maybe ARM has some plans in that area.

Also Apple's ARM CPU is faster than anything else publicly known. Single threaded.

[fg_swe]

Ampere Benchmarks

https://kinvolk.io/blog/2019/11/comparative-benchmark-of-ampere-emag-amd-epyc-and-intel-xeon-for-cloud-native-workloads/